Every year, families in your community are making one of the biggest decisions of their child’s early life: Where to send them to kindergarten. 

They’re not waiting for a flyer in the mail. They aren’t calling area schools blindly, without research. They’re scrolling through social media, Googling kindergarten programs, looking up online reviews, and choosing schools based on what they do (and don’t) see. 

A robust kindergarten enrollment strategy can be one of the most powerful community-building opportunities your school has all year! Done right, it builds trust, sparks excitement, and gets families to take action. 

Kari Klebba, who is the Communications, Community Outreach, and Safety Coordinator for the School District of Milton in Wisconsin, has figured out the secret sauce. And her results have been better than she could have imagined!

We’re talking about their largest 4K class ever, a WSPRA Lighthouse Award, and a signing day reel that outperformed every other post they published that year by over 100,000 views. Keep reading for some specific post examples, straight from Kari’s campaign, plus those of our #SocialSchool4EDU members. 

The Social Media Foundation Behind Milton’s Success

The School District of Milton serves about 3,500 students across nine municipalities and two cities in Wisconsin. According to Kari, “social media is by far our most direct connection to our community!” 

This social media presence includes main district-wide pages that she runs on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, plus a media class’s capstone project page, “Rocky the Red Hawk,” which posts high school athletics and activities. Kari also oversees student-led channels for groups like Student Council and Milton FFA. 

Whew! Kari certainly has her hands full, but if you peruse those pages, you’ll see everything is running like a well-oiled machine. 

All of this foundational content is critical to Kari’s success with her kindergarten enrollment content, because you need an established, consistent online presence that people know, like, and trust before you’ll get any traction with special campaigns.

Now, before we fully break down the full kindergarten enrollment campaign, it’s worth understanding the problem Kari was trying to solve. 

Step 1: Identify Gaps in Enrollment Communications

For years, the School District of Milton did what most schools do to promote enrollment – flyers in the community, ads in the local paper, and outreach to area child care programs. For a long time, it worked!

But over time, as the K12 education landscape got more competitive, Kari started noticing that the enrollment numbers weren’t high enough. Working with her enrollment coordinator, the initial instinct was to do more of the same: Run more ads, publish more flyers, send more letters. But Kari wanted to try something different. 

As she put it, “All communication is good; it helps get the information out there. But we somehow weren’t connecting with the people that we needed to.”

What about your school? Are you just getting information out there, or are you actually connecting? 

Step 2: Find Inspiration – aka “Admire and Acquire”

Once Kari identified this area of opportunity, she started looking at her social media channels with fresh eyes. Families were already engaged with all the pages, and followers were regularly sharing school content. Her question was simple: How should they use these accounts more intentionally for enrollment?

The spark Kari needed came from – where else? – the #SocialSchool4EDU membership community! Kari spotted a post from a private school that had set up a cute chalkboard photo moment at their open house enrollment day. When families committed to joining, they took pictures with it. Simple, celebratory, and so so shareable!

That was the seed for Kari’s campaign. From there, Kari connected something timely happening in Wisconsin that year (the NFL Draft) with a big developmental milestone for 4K kids: Learning to write their own name. 

The result was a “signing day” event! Let’s just take a moment to appreciate Kari’s video:

That same spirit of “admire and acquire” continued to fuel Kari’s kindergarten enrollment campaign. She spotted another idea in the #SocialSchool4EDU group – a reel of a young girl making a big wingspan motion outside a classroom, drawing someone in, with two empty chairs and the words “We saved a seat for you.”

Kari made this idea their own, using it as a perfect segue to promote their in-person orientation:

Bravo! This is exactly what our membership community is built for. 

As Kari shared,

Having the #SocialSchool4EDU program has been fantastic because it’s a collaborative community. It’s also a community that feels comfortable enough to come forward and say, ‘Well, this happened.’ And then you can relate. You can share your advice. You can receive advice.

When it comes to finding inspiration for your enrollment campaigns, you don’t have to start from scratch. You just have to be paying attention!

Step 3: Prep Content in Partnership with Staff

Now that you have an idea of what Kari created, let’s back up to an important step in the content creation process – working with teachers. 

Kari said it well: “Bless our principals and our 4K teachers! They were so open and welcoming to us coming into their classrooms.”

Keep in mind that staff buy-in doesn’t happen by accident. You need to approach teachers with a clear vision, positive enthusiasm, and genuine respect for what teachers are already doing, backed up by the relationships you build with them over time. 

And besides, working with little kids on camera is an adventure! You absolutely need those teachers to be bought into not only your video idea, but the campaign as a whole. 

As Kari put it, “Video in a 4K classroom can be challenging. It’s not that it isn’t high energy… It’s that there’s so much energy.” 

To make her projects a success, Kari leaned on candid photos, simple and legible signs, and letting the kids’ natural reactions tell the story. In several classrooms, they were able to capture the exact moment Rocky the mascot walked through the door, and the kids absolutely lit up. No script needed!

When it comes to more choreographed content, Kari’s approach is thoughtful. For videos borrowed from a trending template, like this next example, she literally demonstrates what she wants the kids to do before hitting “record”:

By the way, this particular idea actually came straight from one of the 4K teachers who spotted it online and sent it to Kari! Talk about buy-in!!

This one took more effort; Kari shared that she visited the classroom a full week early just to teach the kids the moves: 

This experience taught Kari the importance of preparation when it comes to more complex ideas:

I didn’t realize that at that age they don’t necessarily know left from right! I kind of walked away with a lot of pride because after that day, they definitely knew left from right.

When she came back the following week with Rocky to film, the kids ran up to her and said, “Mrs. Klebba, we’ve been practicing!”

Now that moment is what our work is all about!

Step 4: Inform Parents

Going viral is all well and good, but what about concerns over showing students’ faces on social media? 

The School District of Milton includes an opt-out form as part of standard enrollment and registration, so families have already indicated whether they’re comfortable with their child appearing in school communications. But for planned early childhood enrollment campaigns like these, Kari and her 4K teachers take it a step further.

Before any filming happens, an email goes out to 4K families letting them know exactly what’s going on – who’s coming in, what’s being created, and when. That way, every parent has the opportunity to opt their child out if they choose.

Kari pointed out,

There’s also a third benefit – the parents are ready, waiting, and watching and making sure everybody knows. Our families are really our best tool in communication. When they’re excited about what’s happening, they share that information with everybody else, and enthusiasm is contagious!

Think about that: Just a heads-up email can activate your biggest advocates!

Step 5: Publish on Social Media

Kari’s Signing Day content that first year was warm, celebratory, and deeply authentic. Notice how she published a photos-only post with great success!

Even better, this post accomplished exactly what she hoped it would. Website traffic spiked, particularly to the enrollment page. Link clicks went up, and community engagement soared.

Milton has now made the signing day an annual tradition, which proves Kari’s idea has both offline and online support. As she builds out her campaigns with videos like the ones shown above, you can see that each piece of content serves a specific purpose in the enrollment journey – from building awareness to driving families toward orientation and registration.

Check out how static posts factor into her campaign:

Let’s Pause for a Moment

If you’re feeling overwhelmed with the process of setting up, filming, and editing Reels for Instagram and Facebook, you’re not alone! So many school communicators enter their jobs with strong communication and storytelling skills, but social media and short-form videos are on a whole new level. 

My membership program includes school-specific Reels ideas and step-by-step Reels webinars, so you can see exactly how to create, edit, and publish your next trending video!

Step 6: Track Your Results

Kari’s very first signing day campaign produced Milton’s largest 4K class ever. What an amazing, measurable outcome that directly correlates to a social media strategy!

Beyond enrollment numbers, Kari tracked website traffic to the enrollment page, social media engagement, and link clicks to the “learn more” pages. All of them moved in the right direction.

So don’t just post and hope. Know what you’re trying to achieve before you hit publish, and then go back and look at what the data tells you. Those insights are what help you make each year’s campaign stronger than the last.

Bonus Tip: Experiment with AI

For the static content in her campaign, Kari turned to AI. And the results are adorable! Just check out this flyer: 

To generate this cute little bird, Kari fed an image of Rocky the Red Hawk into ChatGPT with a specific prompt: “Make him a friendly, approachable, child Red Hawk.”

What came back was a pint-sized, preschool version of their mascot, who has since become a recurring character across Milton’s 4K promotional materials. From there, Kari takes the AI-generated image into Canva and builds it into graphics, video templates, and more.

Here’s an example of a Facebook event cover:

Remember: Your Work Matters!

I’ll close with something Kari described that has stayed with me since our conversation.

When she walks the hallways of Milton schools now, the kids from that first signing day still recognize her. They say hello; they ask where Rocky is; they ask her if she has her camera with her. They want to be part of telling their schools’ stories.

“The pride that these kids show by being involved in these communications is something that our community never forgets,” Kari said.

That’s the thing about school communications. Yes, you’re trying to hit enrollment numbers. Yes, you’re trying to grow your reach. But somewhere in the middle of all of that, you’re walking into a classroom of four-year-olds and teaching them left from right, and they keep running up to you a year later because they remember your visits! 

And right now, when social media feels heavy, and the world outside our schools feels overwhelming, Kari put it better than I ever could: “That is actually why these stories from our classrooms are so essential right now. I feel that joy, that light, that positivity when we go into our classrooms, and I know that our communities resonate with that, too. When they see these wonderful things, they reconnect, they reengage, and they feel that positivity that we so very much need right now.”

So I challenge you to go create a signing day at your school – or your own version of it. Visit a classroom and teach little kids the Cha-Chat slide. Join a teacher in the staff lounge and pick their brain for ideas. Just go for it!